In the recent past, I wanted to control the OS X window manager from racket like I could on Linux using the X11 library. I found a very sweet Github project called zephyros that implemented a large number of vital routines (vital for managing windows anyway) and provided a simple protocol using json. Since it would be convenient to have a racket module, I wrote a wrapper around it.

Whistlepig is a lightweight real-time search engine written in ANSI C. (description and source) I heard about it when Don Metzler plugged it in an answer he wrote on quora. In this post, with very little code, I was able to build an index, query it and write a servlet that talks to the index using the FFI.

In 2010, I purchased my first Kindle and since then apart from GEB [1], I haven’t bothered with physical copies. The Kindle store satisfies most of my needs (I find situations where the paperback costs less than the digital copy and refuse to buy the book on principle).

The books can be read on any platform (OS X, iOS for iPad and iPhone in my case and I do remember a rather unpleasant Kindle app on WP7)

One of the benefits of a digital book is that it should be straightforward for me to collect a list of highlights I’ve made about the book. Amazon (in their infinite wisdom) have not provided an API in the 3 or so years I’ve used the Kindle ecosystem and manually transcribing the quotes is not something I am interested in doing. Scraping remains the only alternative. I decided to use clojure for this task.